Thursday, March 22, 2012

What is ‘Real’? How do You Define ‘Real’?

Pop culture
reference. Easy one, cause it’s been
awhile...

So, one
thing we all strive for in our writing is realism. We want our characters to feel real. We want our dialogue to sound real. We want our settings to have that level of
detail that only comes from authentic knowledge and experience.

To do this,
writers will people watch and eavesdrop and travel to obscure places just to
get an idea of what the air smells like.
They’ll labor over the dialogue to make it as real as possible. They’ll add random events to their narrative
to give that sense of uncaring fate.
They will make their story as close to reality as possible.

Not real
reality, anyway. Oh, they may say they
do, but that’s kind of a lie. Most
people want fictional reality. They want
clean dialogue. They want characters who
win (maybe not cheerfully or without scars, but they do win). They want things to make sense.

Allow me to
explain.

When people
talk in reality, they make false starts and pause a lot and trip over their words. They can drone on for several minutes at a
time. They talk over each other. If you’ve ever looked at an unedited transcription of a conversation, you know that real dialogue is the worst
possible thing for fiction. People would
claw their eyes out, and everything would take forever to say. When I used to interview writers for articles,
it was just understood that I was going to clean up their words a bit to
eliminate all that stuff. It would just
be incredibly distracting in an article.

So fiction writers
don’t write real dialogue. They write “real”
dialogue, lines that have a certain verisimilitude, if I may be so bold, which
appeals to people. They get cleaned up
and tightened and measured out. These
are the lines that make readers say “Wow, her dialogue felt so real, like she
was someone I’d meet on the street.”
That’s what we all want, right?

Did you catch
that, by the way? The dialogue wasn’t
real—it felt real. Think of how
often things get phrased that way. An
open (and often unconscious) admission that this isn’t how real people
talk. But it feels like how real people should talk.

As I’ve
mentioned before, I’ve made this mistake. I copied real people’s speech patterns into The
Suffering Map, then had two different editors mention that as a specific
reason I was being rejected. It didn’t
matter that it was real dialogue, because it wasn’t “real” dialogue.

Make sense?

On a
similar note, odd, unbelievable stuff happens in reality all the time. There are amazing coincidences. Lucky breaks.
Unexplained things just happen. Heck,
people die in freak accidents and that’s it.
Story’s over, no matter how many things are left unresolved.

I’ve
interviewed several screenwriters who did biopics or “based on true events”
movies, and one thing most of them talked about was the material they didn’t
use. The events that were so ludicrous
people just wouldn’t believe them. A few different folks have said that the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction has to be believable, and these writers realized that. So they removed true events that would've made their story seem silly or implausible.

Here’s another
example I’ve used before (and will continue to use
again)-- Vesna Vulovic. She was a flight attendant back in the ‘70s
(which technically means she was a stewardess) on a flight that was bombed by
terrorists. Vesna fell six miles
through the air and survived. Not in the
sense of held alive in an iron lung on life support, mind you—she’s out there
today walking, talking, having drinks with friends and laughing about
things. She wasn’t even in the hospital
for three months.

Is that the
kind of event I should include in my realistic fiction? Of course not. Nobody would believe that.

Should I
kill my characters at random, leaving their arc unfinished and their secrets
unrevealed? Will readers applaud me for
my daring and realistic writing? Not a
chance. When I’m a writer I’m the God of
my world, and if something doesn’t serve a greater purpose I’m a piss-poor god
at best.

Y’see,
Timmy, reality is a messy thing. Every
aspect of it. And I don’t want my
writing to be messy. I want it to be
clean and polished and perfect.

Even when I’m
making it “real.”

Next
time... well, I’m on a diet right now, and it’s kind of gnawing at me. So I’ll probably end up talking about that.

1 comment:

-----RANDOM FACTS-----

PETER CLINES is a generations-back New Englander (we're talking tall hats and buckled shoes and half-the-population-dies-every-winter generations-back) who broke with tradition and moved to Southern California.

After more than thirty years of writing, fifteen years in the film industry, and six years of writing about writing for the film industry, plus getting several short stories and a novel or nine published, he feels he has some experience and useful advice to offer.